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Beatrice Holmes always wondered how it was possibly to have everything in the world — money, power, admiration, all at her fingertips— yet every day, feel an impossible gnawing hunger. It festered inside her, this hunger. It was the hunger for understanding.
As Edie, she had observed her brothers. A part of her had whispered to herself, “What if they understand you better than Silas can?”
Yet the more she subtly observed them, the more she felt the ocean between herself and them. A deep cavernous divide, with Mycroft’s dull need for comfort, and Sherlock’s impulsive boyish attitude. She was undeniably above them in intelligence and drive, and thus could not find any semblance of understanding from them.
She had also thought upon seeing James, with his facile charm and fierce ambition, that he would be the one to understand her. But she saw how he looked at Sherlock, how she heard them laugh, how their eyes lingered when they thought no one else was around. No, James Moriarty could not understand her. He was caught up in the whirlwind of Sherlock, and caught up in his own battling mind.
For years, Beatrice had believed that her father would sate that festering loneliness, as he took her to see the world and pulled her into his world of intrigue and deception. She laughs bitterly recalling her behavior. Silas cared only for
himself.
And now she stood at the cliff, gun pointed at her father. She is certain her mother would have wanted to kill him herself, the Clytemnestra avenging the death of Iphigenia. But it felt fitting for her, the sacrificial lamb, the cast aside daughter, invisible in plain sight, to be the one to give the killing blow. She had felt his breath stagger in that cave when she pulled the trigger, felt the warmth of his blood pour out as she pushed him away. It felt righteous.
Beatrice paused, and looked at the woman who stood by her side. She was holding a pistol as well, confident in stature, face drawn, an angel heralding death.
Beatrice realized that she had never seen anything as beautiful.
Realistically, she should have been peeved that someone sought to rob her of her revenge for those years lost, but Beatrice recalled the pieces she had heard of the assassin, from the complaints of her father, of Hodge, and of her own brother.
There was something more that drove her far from her homeland, tracking down and murdering professors.
She could not find it in her to complain.
And as they both stood, pistols drawn against the man whose actions robbed them from their families and tore them from their homes, Beatrice felt understood.
“There,” she thought. “The hunger was sated. That distinct homophrosyne.”